2014 Range Rover LWB: Larger and more in charge

DanNeil

Dan Neil/The Wall Street Journal

The 2014 Range Rover Long Wheelbase is a beast, a beautiful panic, a runaway gantry heaving into view. Something this large and rectangular shouldn't move this quickly.

Whoa. Oh no. It’s…look out! It’s the Range Rover Long Wheelbase (LWB) Supercharged, with 7.8 inches more of the company’s megasize luxury SUV to love, if you have any love in your ashen hearts, you swine.

One of the few vehicles on the market that can still reliably return single-digit fuel economy during a night on the town, the LWB’s efficiency is—and I mean this in the nicest way possible—negligent (EPA-rated 14/19/16 mpg, city/highway/combined).

And that is only one of the ways the LWB is a paragon of moral decay. It is obscenely fast—0-60 in 5.5 seconds—wretchedly comfortable, and belligerently large. The thing rounds a corner like it should have a water cannon on the roof.

The LWB is how you roll when you just don’t care. Really. Don’t care.

The long wheelbase package is livery trade, of course. Call it luxury logistics: celebrity car services, five-star hotels and resorts, diplomatic missions. If you have a wedding-catering service in Dubai, you have about 20 of these in your bestiary, I think.

The LWB’s additional amenities are focused where the client/owner sits, in the rear cabin, including paparazzi-foiling rear-side power window blinds and a panoramic moonroof with power blind. A four-zone cabin-climate system was a $4,150 option on our test car ($122,900), including climate-controlled front seats with massage function; and climate controlled rear seats with power recline and tilt. The rear seats rake to a relaxed 17 degrees (don’t go there).

Other upfits included the dual-screen rear-entertainment system with remote and wireless headphones ($2,400) and a chest-thumping Meridian audio system ($1,850). Beverage cooler? Check.

Our test car even included the tow package ($1,300), with active locking rear differential and full-size spare, handy if you’re away from the compound and angry crowds shoot one of your tires out.

I know what you are thinking: China. In the status anxiety that afflicts modern China, a vehicle like the LWB—huge, British, powerful—is catnip. Jaguar Land Rover is practically falling over itself to set a beachhead in the Chinese market (though execs note that the U.S. is still the biggest for JLR overall). At the most recent Beijing Auto show, in April, the company unveiled the LWB with a V6 diesel hybrid powertrain. Land Rover expects about a quarter of Range Rovers sold in U.S. to be long wheelbase, compared with 40% in China.

The thing is a beast, a beautiful panic, a runaway gantry heaving into view. The LWB is of dimensions just large enough to scare little children and make dogs bark as if they sense a deeper evil.

I wonder if there isn’t in the potential popularity of Range Rover in China a kind of postcolonial blowback, with the Chinese wanting to possess, to own, these chauffeur-driven symbols of British privilege?

It’s a kind of opium, anyway. The LWB is wrapped in acoustically laminated glass, heavily sedated with sound insulation and upholstered in an endometrium of very supple hides. I was particularly fond of our test car’s “shadow walnut” veneer with lustered aluminum trim. The rear cabin, where the boss sits, has the overgenerous dimensions of, say, a Hispano-Suiza town car of the 1920s. Bear in mind, this is a four-passenger vehicle that weighs 5,320 pounds, so one could say it delivers an acute sense of structure.

But now, I can’t go on without addressing my hideous family secret. My wife wants a vintage Range Rover, preferably a two-door in British green and black brush bars—Oy! And, of course, she wants one produced during the model’s most problem-plagued years, which date from beginning of production (1970) to the end (1996).

No, seriously, a properly sorted first-gen with manual transmission, coil springs and carbureted V8 would be absolutely cricket, but I have nowhere to park it and no garage in which to perform routine maintenance, like transmission replacements.

And besides, this fixation with the Range Rover, which codes Veblen in so many ways, is unseemly for Americans. Are we going to be large-animal veterinarians, or itinerant farriers? Should I start throwing my head back and speaking in a phony British accent, like Madonna? Clive, tell me, did my head gasket arrive?

And yet, I’m weakening. (Don’t even look at me like that!) If she wanted a coal barge I’d be out shopping for a tugboat. And so the process of rationalizing has begun. Well, finding spare parts certainly won’t be a problem. The countryside around Greenwich, Conn., sprouts Range Rovers like fungi. Maybe we can take up fox hunting.

The current LWB positively dwarfs the one my wife wants, which got by with a 108-inch wheelbase. The 2014 edition rides on a 122.8-inch wheelbase (7.8 inches longer than standard RR) and measures, nose-to-tail, a goodly 204.7 inches, about the same as a Chevy Tahoe. Shod with 21-inch wheels and 45-series tires, the LWB stands just over 6 feet tall.

The thing is a beast, a beautiful panic, a runaway gantry heaving into view. The LWB is of dimensions just large enough to scare little children and make dogs bark as if they sense a deeper evil. Something this large and rectangular shouldn’t move this quickly.

Dan Neil/The Wall Street Journal

Another part of the Range Rover’s LWB overall insolence: its disregard of physics. The supercharger shovels air into the V8 with abandon, producing 461 pound-feet of torque from 2,500 all the way to 5,500 rpm, which is a broad hunk of twist even before it reaches the eight-speed automatic transmission. Further downstream is some of the company’s full-time, terrain-sensing four-wheel drive system with center locking diff standard and optional locking rear diff (towing package).

That’s a lot of mink-wrapped cogs all in a row. The emphasis here is on a deep, rich fluid actuation, as one would expect in what is essentially a limousine. When you pin the throttle, the film speeds up, but the drama remains well behind the barricades.

Perfect? No. JLR powertrain’s lads and lassies might want to look at the RR’s stop/start calibrations. (Start/stop systems save fuel by shutting down the engine when the vehicle is stopped.) When the supercharged 5.0-liter V8 relights, the big truck shudders exactly like a bumper car when they turn the electricity on. Bwmmmmmmm. Such are the challenges of containing vibration when you stir an engine this size with, if you will pardon the expression, a massive crank.

The rear cargo cover is fiddly. Sometimes, when I parked the LWB, the engine would shut off automatically (stop/start, again) and when I reflexively attempted to turn off the engine I actually restarted the vehicle. I’m having Jeeves beaten. But nothing else on the market accommodates the long legs of wealth quite like the LWB. If you have to burn in hell for something, it might as well be this.

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